The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
There are numerous types of counters in distributed devices in a packet-switched system, such as a chassis-based switch or router. Obtaining accurate counter values from those distributed counters is helpful for monitoring operation. For example, frame loss measurement is a mechanism defined by some computer network operation and management standards, such as the standard ITU-T Y.1731, OAM Functions and Mechanisms for Ethernet-based Networks, where OAM stands for Operation, Administration and Maintenance. The scheme computes the frame loss rate of a link between two nodes in a computer network by counting the number of packets transmitted and received over intervals using transmission and reception counters in the nodes. When several links are grouped together as a link aggregation group (LAG) to form a logical link over different packet processors, or in situations where multi-path routing protocols are deployed, obtaining accurate counter values of transmitted and received packets for the logical link is challenging